Julian Barnes weighs in on three collections of George Orwell’s work— Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, compiled and with an introduction by George Packer; All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays, again compiled by George Packer, with an introduction by Keith Gessen; and Why I Write— in his latest essay for the New York Review of Books, “Such, Such Was Eric Blair.”
Barnes uses the collections to paint a portrait of Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, as a man, as a writer, and as a possible national treasure of England. The essay spans Orwell’s life, starting with a look at Orwell’s critique of the boarding school he attended in the early 20th century, “Orwell […] writes with the unhealed pain of an abused child, a pain that occasionally leaks into his prose,” through to the importance of how he is remembered after death:
One small moment of literary history at which many Orwellians would like to have been present was an encounter in Bertorelli’s restaurant in London between Orwell’s biographer Bernard Crick and Orwell’s widow, Sonia. Crick dared to doubt the utter truthfulness of one of Orwell’s most celebrated pieces of reportage, “Shooting an Elephant.” Sonia, “to the delight of other clients,” according to Crick, “screamed” at him across the table, “Of course he shot a fucking elephant. He said he did. Why do you always doubt his fucking word!” The widow, you feel, was screaming for England. Because what England wants to believe about Orwell is that, having seen through the dogma and false words of political ideologies, he refuted the notion that facts are relative, flexible, or purpose-serving; further, he taught us that even if 100 percent truth is unobtainable, then 67 percent is and always will be better than 66 percent, and that even such a small percentage point is a morally nonnegotiable unit.
